InterSystems Developer Community

09/01/2026

🤠 There was no existing priority queue implementation for ObjectScript, so someone built one — and then benchmarked four different approaches against each other using Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm on a 150,000-vertex graph.

The surprising finding: the best approach is not a binary heap at all. It is using the fact that multidimensional arrays in ObjectScript are always sorted. You store your data as data(evaluation, obj_str_rep) = object and use $Order to get the minimum element. No heap logic needed.

The numbers: self-sorting multidimensional finished in 45 seconds. The binary heap on multidimensional took 381 seconds. The %DynamicArray-based heap took 3,466 seconds — and its time per batch kept growing as the queue got bigger 😄

The article includes complete ObjectScript code for both the binary heap and the self-sorting implementation, so you can drop either one into your own projects.

Read the full article 👇
https://community.intersystems.com/post/best-structure-make-priority-queue-objectscript

08/31/2026

🤠 There is one phrase from this InterSystems security session that captures everything: "Encryption is easy. Key management is hard."

The session covers how InterSystems IRIS implements transparent data encryption — your application code never touches encrypted data, the encryption happens at the boundary between memory and disk. It also covers three key management models: a local key file (simplest, best for development), cloud KMS like AWS (good for cloud workloads, every key access is logged, no passwords needed when using IAM roles), and KMIP with Hardware Security Modules (strongest separation of duties, keys never leave the hardware boundary) 😄

Two important things encryption does NOT protect against: ransomware (the attacker encrypts your already-encrypted data and you still lose access), and an attacker with access to the running system (unencrypted data is readable from memory).

The roadmap includes online database encryption — encrypting while the database stays readable and writable — and quantum-resistant encryption support.

One practical warning from the session: if you lose the key, you lose the data. Break glass planning is not optional.

Watch full video -

08/28/2026

Hospital readmission risk scoring doesn't need an LLM reading raw patient records.

Smart Discharge Navigator is a hybrid rule-based and AI system on InterSystems IRIS for Health that scores readmission risk from FHIR data and writes discharge plans back into the patient record.

The interesting design decision isn't GPT-4o — it's what happens before the model ever sees a patient. Scoring risk means checking multiple FHIR resources at once: recent admissions, active conditions, medication counts, missed follow-ups. Parsing FHIR JSON bundles in Python for that, patient by patient, gets slow and fragile once you're looking at a whole population instead of one chart.

FHIR SQL Builder solves that by exposing resources like Patient, Encounter, Condition, and MedicationRequest as SQL-queryable tables inside IRIS for Health — population-level questions become plain SQL joins instead of looping REST calls in application code.

That SQL layer produces a structured risk score, and only that structured summary — not raw FHIR — gets passed to GPT-4o to catch patterns the rules miss. Results are written back as FHIR CarePlan and Task resources, closing the loop from data to recommendation to record. It also still works in rule-based mode with no AI model at all.

Full technical walkthrough with SQL examples on the InterSystems Developer Community — link in the comments.

Full walkthrough — FHIR SQL Builder, the rule + AI hybrid scoring, and the SQL examples — on the InterSystems Developer Community: https://community.intersystems.com/post/how-fhir-sql-builder-powers-real-time-readmission-risk-scoring?utm_source=linkedin_ai&utm_medium=linkedin_ai&utm_campaign=how-fhir-sql-builder-powers-real-time-readmission-risk-scoring

08/27/2026

🎉 The wait is over — the recording is here!

Missed our InterSystems IRIS AI Hub: Goals, Games & Goodies webinar? Or want to go back and revisit a demo? The full recording is now available on YouTube! ▶️

We packed a lot into one session: an introduction to InterSystems IRIS AI Hub, a technical deep dive, SQL Golf, IRIS Mus, and lessons learned from actually working with AI Hub 🚀

A huge thank you to everyone who made it happen:
👏 Iryna Mykhailova, PhD — webinar host
👏 Benjamin De Boe — AI Hub overview
👏 Gabriel Ing — technical deep dive
👏 Lynn Wu — SQL Golf game
👏 Luis Ángel Pérez Ramos — IRIS Mus game
👏 Gianni Muzzin from Zorgi
👏 Heloisa Tambara Paiva from Zarmik

And thank you to everyone who joined us live, asked questions, and played along!

🎥 Watch the recording: https://youtu.be/OMf3N3MALF4

Want to keep exploring?

🧑‍💻 Try InterSystems IRIS AI Hub through the Early Access Program: https://evaluation.intersystems.com/Eval/early-access/AIHub

💬 Join the AI Hub conversation on Discord: https://discord.com/channels/698987699406766170/1521152420963418122

More AI Hub demos, experiments, and real-world experiences to come. Stay tuned! 👀

08/26/2026

How do you train a forecasting model with zero historical data?

AXS and B+ answered that by building a physics-based digital twin of their solar plants on InterSystems IRIS — simulating the plant instead of waiting years for real data.

The twin, built with embedded Python and pvlib, had to get basic physics right first. One example: most global solar datasets assume panels face south — but in Brazil, panels face north. Fixing that and two other physics assumptions got the twin to 81% accuracy on day one, tested against 28 days of real generation data.

The system, called Orion, now runs in production across AXS's solar plants — more than 50,000 customers and 350 MW of peak generation — with forecast accuracy currently at 98% and improving every month.

Full session on YouTube:

See how AXS Energia (ROCA Group) is building the Orion AI project w...

08/25/2026

⚡ Making SSE Streaming Work with ObjectScript

Server-Sent Events should reach the client as soon as they’re ready, but Web Gateway buffering can turn it into a challenge.
Explore how ObjectScript and can handle real-time SSE delivery, browser streaming, and AI API passthrough – and try it out with the code snippets.

👉 Read the full article on the Developer Community: https://community.intersystems.com/post/bringing-server-sent-events-objectscript-solving-web-gateway-buffer-problem

08/24/2026

InterSystems IRIS gets called a "Universal NoSQL" database, and the reason comes down to one thing: Global Storage.

Global Storage stores data as persistent, schema-free hierarchies — nested arrays where you don't have to define the structure in advance. A node looks like this:
^employee("UK", "London", 123456789, "name") = "Jon Doe"

Country, city, employee ID, property — the hierarchy goes as deep as you need, and only nodes that actually hold data take up space.

What makes it interesting is that the same hierarchy underneath can be shaped into very different things: key/value pairs, JSON-like documents, graphs, even relational tables. It's also why the structure maps so naturally onto JSON — QEWD-JSdb uses exactly that to let you work with persistent data as plain JavaScript objects, with no separate database API in the way.

IRIS and Caché implement this natively, and so does YottaDB. The same idea has also been built on top of Redis, Berkeley DB, and LMDB elsewhere.

Full walkthrough on the InterSystems Developer Community — link in the comments.

08/21/2026

Switching from Studio to VS Code? It's not just a new editor.

VS Code is a development platform: extensions, modern debugging, and AI-assisted coding for InterSystems IRIS work.

Start with the InterSystems ObjectScript Extension Pack — it covers connecting to IRIS, editing ObjectScript, compiling, and running code, alongside mature extensions for Git, Docker, and Python.

Two changes stand out most:
🔹 Real debugging — breakpoints, variable inspection, step-through ex*****on. No more temporary WRITE statements just to see what's happening.
🔹 AI assistants (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code) that explain unfamiliar ObjectScript, generate boilerplate, and write tests — most useful for navigating large codebases faster, not for replacing code review.

What's been the biggest adjustment for you moving from Studio?

Full breakdown of plugins, debugging, and AI tooling on the InterSystems Developer Community — link in the comments.

08/20/2026

⏳ Only two weeks left to join Round 2 of the Community Bounty Program "Idea to Application"!

Choose one or more of the featured Ideas Portal requests, publish your application on Open Exchange, and earn 10K Global Masters points, badges, and recognition – while contributing with your project to the Community.

Challenges:
🔹 Generic Agent Test UI for %AI.Agent
🔹 MCP Data Exposure Toolkit
🔹 My First Agent (End-To-End Starter)
🔹 Create a tool for IRIS BI to test all the pivots and dashboards if they still work after changes are made
🔹 Allow export to new xlsx format from BI

📅 Submit by August 31, 2026
👉 Details: https://community.intersystems.com/post/community-bounty-program-idea-application-%E2%80%94-round-2-live

08/20/2026

🤖 Modernizing Data Architecture for the Agentic Enterprise

AI is moving quickly, but many enterprise data environments were not designed for the workloads that generative and agentic applications now demand. Preparing for this shift means more than introducing new AI technologies. Organizations need to strengthen their existing data foundations, reduce fragmentation, and make data easier to access and use across applications.

Discover how can support this transition by bringing data, analytics, integration, and AI together in a modern, converged architecture.

👉 Read the full article on the Developer Community: https://community.intersystems.com/post/enable-agentic-enterprise-intersystems-iris-data-platform-technology-guide